Kathleen Collins (5)Recensioni

This is a slim volume, but when I started it a couple years ago I did not really connect with the first story, and instead of powering through I placed it back on the shelf. My decision to not just give away the book had more to do with how much I liked the cover than how much I liked the story. A few weeks back I picked it up, read the second story, and really liked it and so I moved on. The quality of these pieces in really inconsistent but the good stories are absolutely fantastic - earthy, revealing, honest and really beautifully written. Collins died of cancer in her 40's and her daughter found her writings and chose these to put in this collection. We can hope she left more.

Kurze Inhaltsangabe
In der hitzigen Atmosphäre der Bürgerrechtsbewegung ziehen Studenten und Aktivisten durch New York. Schwarze und Weisse, die glauben, dass eine bessere Zukunft möglich ist, wenn man nur bereit ist, sich dafür einzusetzen. Junge schwarze Frauen fahren in den Süden, um gegen die Segregation zu kämpfen, für Gleichheit und Emanzipation. Sie entdecken neue Frei- heiten, ihren Vätern gegenüber und ihren Liebhabern. So vieles scheint möglich in diesem Sommer. Alle träumen von einer Welt, in der das Leben nicht entweder schwarz oder weiss ist. Und die Liebe? Kennt sie wirklich keine Farben? Kann sie der Wirklichkeit standhalten?

Never heard of the author (being from Europe) but that title... It hits me hard.

In this posthumous collection of short stories, author Kathleen Collins focuses mainly on women like herself--intellectual and artistic New Yorkers or New Englanders who have light skin despite African heritage. In these stories, especially the title story and the closing piece, "Dead Memories...Dead Dreams," such men and women see themselves as an elite group, but they still face misunderstanding outside their own circles. Communication, and the difficulties thereof, is a major concern, and death, particularly by suicide, is a constant companion.

These very short stories are highly readable, although some feel unfinished. Recommended.

An interesting collection of stories set in the 1960's. The last one was particularly enjoyable, but they were all very interesting.

This was a wonderful set of short stories. Some of them, you could really feel Collins' film background, and others felt more like Southern Gothic. A couple were meh, but you expect that from a short story collection. Overall, a lovely treat to read.

This collection of quiet, thoughtful stories is excellent. They offer an unvarnished picture of life in the 1960s, a time of unrest that straddled the ages. I happened to read the stories while I was also reading John Lewis's March Trilogy, and they are a wonderful complement to each other.

Collins offers the perspective of an African American woman, yet never letting race be the entire story. The stories are also about friendship, love, family, and making your way in a changing world.

I particularly love her descriptive language. For example, she says of one character "His children had grown up inside his sorrow." Or of the times, "It is a time that calls forth the most picturesque of metaphors, for we are swimming along in the mythical underbelly of America . . . there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding."

I'm so glad this previously hidden work has come to light!

This newly published collection of stories is a short read, not breathtaking or beautiful, but important because of the freshness and rawness of her perspective. It seems unfiltered, unedited, but Collins' appreciation of people for being the multi-faceted, unique people that they are is evident.

The stories sometimes read more like journal entries, and even include self-aware stream of consciousness moments. The setting and historical context are important to the stories, but not foundational.

In her own unconventional and sometimes strange ways, Collins normalizes intellectual introspection, not as a woman or as a person of color, but as a human.

I loved it. The stories were written in the 70s and 80s but feel fresh, delicate, light-footed. The stories tell the emotional truth but they tell it slant. Collins' background as a filmmaker is evident; stories are told in monologues and sketches of a director setting up a scene. The stories are cinematic; the emotions are deep but its essence distilled into a character or a moment. It's like a camera utilising time jumps and moving through space, fluidly going back and forth between time, the past existing alongside the present. The past not as a separate world, but very much alive in the present. The stories are short but contain a world of depth about racism and the inner lives of black women. And the humour is sly and delicious.

Full review appears here.

Absolutely superb. Just superb. Wow.

From the jacket cover: "Kathleen Collins was a pioneer African American playwright, filmmaker, civil rights activist, film editor, and educator. Her film Losing Ground is one of the first features made by a black woman in America, and is an extremely rare narrative portrayal of a black female intellectual. Collins died in 1988 at the age of forty-six."

This collection of Collins' previously undiscovered stories was published in 2016 and it's a great addition to the genre. Collins doesn't tell a story as much as she allows a story to tell itself. I didn't love every story in this collection but the best ones (the first and last are two among those but I also loved "Lifelines" and a few others) are vivid glimpses of black American life as the civil rights movement of the 1960s gained steam and defined a generation. The author explores themes of family and identity, difficult choices and sacrifice, all through deeply intimate moments set deftly in the context of racial and gender politics in an era of dizzyingly shifting expectations.½

Born in 1942, Kathleen Collins was a groundbreaking filmmaker, artist, and writer - part of the generation of African Americans, many of whom who were "the firsts" in their fields. Her 1982 film Losing Ground was the first feature-length dramatic film directed by an African American woman. When she died from cancer in 1988, she left most of her documents and other works to her daughter, Nina. After years of pouring over this massive cache, Nina began working to get many of the pieces either reissued, published, or otherwise sent out into the world. One example of this effort is the short story collection WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE.

The collection is composed of 16 stories of varying lengths, from as short as 4 pages to as long as 26 pages. In the story When All Love Withers All of Life Cries, the narrator of the story comments that, "the words are only icing; you keep going past the words you got nothing but surprises" (pg. 98), and this quote accurately sums up my feelings about all of the stories. I found that, no matter the length of the story, I was equally engaged, moved, and satisfied. This is quite a feat, considering that about half of the stories are 10 pages long or less. The way that the author illustrates her characters and her scenes has a lot to do with this, I think. Because of her background in film, she is able to masterfully "show" a scene without "telling" too much. The writing is clear and vivid, but without a trace of any extraneous language. This collection is constructed on an economy of words, but contains a wealth of emotion.

There are many themes in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE, and many of them reappear in multiple stories, but in different ways. Some of the more prominent themes are gender roles (adhering to/denying), racial identity, socioeconomic class, beauty standards, romantic/family relationships (often breaking apart throughout the course of the story), artistic endeavors, friendships, and social justice. I was reminded of John Lewis' graphic memoir trilogy MARCH, because some of the short story characters travel from their homes in the North to help with efforts to register Southern African Americans to vote; those characters often suffering or bearing witness to violence against such efforts.

One of the most groundbreaking points to take away from this collection is the lack of what is known as "white gaze". The narrators of the stories are all African Americans or other non-white characters. The scenes are so crafted that it might not be obvious to the reader at first, but there are no instances of a white character narrating an African American experience. Even in our modern literary culture, it's difficult to find examples of works that don't contain some degree of white gaze. For this concept to be considered groundbreaking is important, but also concerning, because it indicates a tradition of African Americans not being in charge of their own stories.

Containing a range of settings, characters, stories, lengths, and themes - I found WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE to be a completely satisfying reading experience. I was wholly engaged throughout each and every story, which is a difficult feat in and of itself. Considering the stories were written decades ago, many of the themes are just as relevant in today's society as they were at the time of their inception. Overall, I was thoroughly impressed with WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE, and hope that the author's daughter Nina is able to have other stories published. I will read whatever else she has written.